Like so many things that seem like a little thing at the time, Filamena Young created a hashtag on Twitter to help her and others respond to Luke Crane's question of "Why are there so few lady game creators?"

I don't know if either one of them foresaw the upwelling of game industry professionals in all disciplines sharing simple, short descriptions of the things that make it hard to work there. Though once it started to grow, I don't think anyone was too surprised at the accompanying swell of vitriol.

I'm not going to address the companies trying to take advantage of it, or address the crudest and most hateful ways some have chosen to respond to women answering Luke's simple question. Every time I let myself refresh the list, I see someone has found a new and interesting way to drag the conversation towards the Pit of Despair, lurking among the more common spammers and kitchen/sandwich jokes. It's still moving very fast, and if I tried to keep up, this article would be an even bigger wall of text and some of it would be very rude.

And while I could spend another night with my jaw clenched, typing furiously in 140-character chunks, I thought it would be best to step back and breathe a bit. Instead of replying to individual entries, it might be better to summarize my rebuttals to some trends I've found in the negative responses on Twitter and the commentary section attached to some articles.